Then the first time open heart surgery was performed, he had to undergo that too." The long-suffering bear is still in existence, "but he's a catastrophe now," laments Gaultier, struggling to keep a straight face. "You should see him: he needs silicone and Botox - the whole lot."

If it weren't obvious from the 58-year-old Frenchman's designs - the wry renditions of trench coats, high-camp striped Breton sweaters and conical corsets and bras that he created for Madonna's 1990 Blond Ambition concert tour - it's immediately clear when you meet Gaultier that he is that rare thing: a French man with humour.

On the day of our interview, traces of his wit and whimsy are all around us. Dressed in a great coat and jeans, that closely cropped head pale against the dark cashmere, Gaultier is in the midst of transforming a freezing Vauxhall warehouse into a Terry Gilliam style wonderland for Elton John's yearly Grey Goose Character and Cocktails Aids Foundation winter ball.

The place is scattered with trompe l'oeil furniture, pink lace Eiffel towers and hourglass shaped bars, and in the distance a man is hoisting a large cardboard Saturn, suspended on invisible wiring, to the ceiling.

"We need that higher in the sky - much higher," he shouts over, chuckling along when the workmen start laughing at that ludicrous "'Allo 'Allo!" accent.

It's the designer's sense of the absurd that's perhaps most un-Gallic about Gaultier, one of the only Frenchmen I've met who sees the point of Monty Python. "I've always felt more at home in the UK than in France," he assures me when I point this out, his face animated, all of a sudden.

"There is a particular humour in Britain that you don't find elsewhere, and one can see that in the way you dress. You're so good at making fun of yourself here, whereas in France people feel that they always have to be serious, tasteful, and adhere to 'the code'.

!People think that everyone wears black in France; in fact they all wear grey. The other day I was in the Brasserie Lipp looking at all these people in their velvet corduroy jackets and there was this one woman wearing very red lipstick and a bright green dress who really stood out. Her colourfulness was such that it was a gift to the other people there. And guess what? She was English."

He claims to avoid political discussion in public, but talks at length and with visible frustration about the "stalemate" France has found itself in. Recent strikes over pension reform only illustrate a deep-seated unwillingness to change, he maintains, that will hold the country back.

"What they really want is a revolution, but people riot because they want things to stay as they are, and the majority of the French have this very negative attitude. They're like bureaucrats: it's all no, no, no - and that's our catastrophe."

He admires Sarkozy for being one of the few Presidents to encourage change, but it's his wife Carla's chameleon qualities that draw a silent whistle of admiration from Gaultier.

"She's been so clever because she's playing the role of the First Lady and she's doing it well. Carla would have been assassinated if she'd dressed the way she normally likes to dress. Then when she's promoting her albums, she dresses as a singer again."

Gaultier's irreverence and refusal to conform set him apart early on when Pierre Cardin, impressed by a set of sketches the 18-year-old unknown from Arcueil, Val-de-Marne had sent him, hired him as an assistant.

Working with Cardin had a formative impact on Gaultier, but a subsequent stint at the rather more BCBG Jean Patou failed to. "Everything was beige and gold and it was all so safe and old," he grimaces.

The young createur would confound his staid co-workers by turning up in riding boots to the office. "I just liked the way they looked, but everyone would say 'what are you wearing? Are you going to go riding?'"

Gaultier released his first collection in 1976 and by the early 1980s had secured the label "the enfant terrible of French fashion".

"People reacted much better to me in the UK, which was where it was all happening. Jean Muir was big at the time here and she was fabulous, as was Zandra Rhodes. You could see the craziness in the British people, but I couldn't move because I'd already started in Paris."

There was another reason to stay in France: Gaultier's first serious boyfriend and business partner at the time, Francis Menuge.

In 1990, fifteen years after they first met, Menuge died of Aids, which is partly why the designer travelled to London last month and helped to raise over £600,000 for Sir Elton's Aids Foundation. "It was

Francis who really urged me on at the start of my career, because I'm more of an abstract than an ambitious person. He saw my talent and felt my passion and would always push me when I was lazy or demotivated. He'd jokingly encourage me to build 'my empire'."

This still elicits a soft laugh from Gaultier all these years later, and yet a global empire is what he built. As well as Haute Couture, Gaultier's labels now include denim, eyewear, jewellery, childrenswear and homewear.

In 2003, Hermes made him their creative director, a post he kept until this year. "I would be a different person today if I hadn't met Francis," he says, and for the first time in our interview his face loses it's readiness to smile.

"I would still have been in fashion, of course, but perhaps, I would not have made a record or done Eurotrash." But we all loved Eurotrash, I remonstrate.

"I know," he agrees, smiling again, "it was ridiculous and fun. When Antoine de Caunes first asked me I said no because I couldn't act, but he said: 'we know - that's why we want you.'"

Gaultier's theatrical streak was evident to his father, an accountant, and mother, a secretary, from an early age. But it was Gaultier's grandmother - a nurse who would ask for her grandson's help in lacing up her corset - who was responsible for an obsession with the female

form that was to become his trademark. "Not because she had that shape," he giggles, "but I would watch her put on a corset that would give her that shape at a time when every woman looked like Twiggy.

"I found the instrument so fabulous and beautiful, right down to the texture of it and the way it laced up down the back. From that moment I became fascinated by the idea of transforming one's body with clothes, and the idea that certain garments can accentuate something you want and hide something you don't want."

Alerted, perhaps, by her grandson's addiction to a TV show based on the Folies Bergeres and his propensity towards making feathered headdresses for his teddy bear, Gaultier's grandmother gave him a book in which a gay love affair was implicit.

Still the moment of sexual realisation didn't come until he went to see Zeferellis' Romeo and Juliet - and couldn't decide who he had the bigger crush on: Leonard Whiting or Olivia Hussey.

"Thankfully times were changing. Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge were overtly a couple back then and ten years later when I said I had met a boy, my parents just asked: "Do you love each other? Then that's wonderful."

In a cruel twist, Gaultier's professional elevation coincided with his lover becoming seriously ill and dying. The corsets he designed that year for Madonna's world tour now rank alongside Marilyn Monroe's white halter-neck dress and Audrey Hepburn's black Givenchy LBD in fashion iconography. Did he realise how important they would be at the time?

"No," he shrugs. "I was a fan of Madonna's so I was pleased to collaborate with her for that reason - not because it would be good for my career."

Now that underwear as outerwear is pretty much de rigueur for any self-respecting pop star, some artists, like Lady Gaga - also a fan of the JPG corset - are forced to take things further still.

"I think she's talented and very inpolitically incorrect, which I love. But I also think that she read up on Madonna's life and learnt it like the Bible."

In the distance, an assistant clamours for his attention but Gaultier won't be hurried and as we talk at greater length about his work with the Aids foundation and memories of the man he still calls "the love of my life." Had Menuge lived, might the couple have 'married' or adopted a child?

"Francis always wanted to have children," smiles Gaultier, "but I always felt that I was a child myself. Actually, the business that we forged together was like a child in the end - and the great thing is that it is still around today."